The Cost of Doing Business – A Review

5pm and it’s already dark out. TVs mounted to bodega walls spit out poll information, several hours too early, as I dodge puddles and make my way to what I’m reminded is a Queens bound, M, local train. I step on and it’s crowded. My glasses fog up, so I take them off and slip them into my coat pocket.

I can’t read the marquee anymore, and there’s too many people in the way for me to get closer. And I just so happened to be on the one M train car whose speaker is busted.

Them’s the breaks, kid.

I look out the window for my destination instead. Sure, I can wait to read the sign that says “Seneca” on the decorative girders at the station, but I can’t do that right now, so rather, I focus on trying to pinpoint the church, you know the one with the massive spire? It’s only a few blocks from my house, and I can easily use that to take me home.

But of course, it’s foggy and raining. And with bad eyes, I can’t see that far either. But, I do recognize a bright green fuzzy stripe across a deep purple squiggly line. The colors are so objectively mismatched that I know this is my stop.

I pop out of the train and slide between the ticket turnstile. I make my way down the stairs, turn left twice, then right, and then right again. I cross when I can here, turn left and walk until I see a laundromat or Greene Ave.

During the walk, I’m doing mental math, trying to figure out my cost of living. And it gets me thinking about price in general.

What does teaching cost? Maybe my sanity? It certainly has killed the nerve endings in my feet. So maybe, I’ve paid sanity to finally stop being so ticklish? A fair trade, in my opinion. Or maybe I haven’t paid anything, except too much attention in the teacher’s lounge. Maybe there isn’t a price aside from what’s on paper. Rent, metro card, health care, receipts.

But fantasy novels taught me that everything has a cost.

So, do I have a dollar value associated with me?

What’s my price, how do I set it? Do I want it to be low or high? Do I charge friends less, do I charge friends more?

It’s not easy being a commodity.

And yet, artistically, that’s all people seem to want to be. But is it what we ought to be? Honestly, it seems ridiculously complicated. This push and pull, this need to be compensated. So what? Maybe price isn’t inherit.

Value certainly isn’t, then I might find the time to have time to have time.

Back on the rails again, I’m wondering if, in the same way all actions have an opposite reaction, do all things have an associated cost? And are they universal?

I’m never one to deal in absolutes (haha), but it’d be nice to have a reference sheet for this kind of stuff.

Just a small wallet size unfoldable that went into detail about how being human worked.

Hey. I don’t know what happened in this blog. But I’m a bit exhausted, and a bit sick, and a bit flooded with thoughts I need to forget, so. I’m going to just call it here. I hope you liked the rhyming bit.

I sure did.

Have a good week. You’re nearly to the weekend! Congrats!